Friday, October 24, 2014

Trying out HouseAgent

For the last couple of years I've been looking for some Home Automation software to run the hardware that I'm slowly building to automate my house. There are so many choices that I'm not sure where to start. I discovered HouseAgent mostly because it's written in Python, and I really like Python, so I thought I'd give it a test drive.

HouseAgent is a python-based home automation tool, with a promising architecture. It appears that plugins are separate processes that communicate via AMQP, which means they can be written in (almost) any programming language. It has a web interface, and a simple rules engine.

I installed the latest daily build of House Agent on a Windows 7 machine and ran into some problems. The main problem was that it wouldn't launch.

After poking around for a while I figured out that you could run the House Agent daemon at the command line to get more info. Just run 'houseagent.exe debug' to display debug messages. I quickly discovered that there were files missing, namely houseagent.conf. I grabbed these files from the git repo and put them in the places the error messages referred to. The next error I had was that the port it was trying to use was already in use (8080) so I changed that in houseagent.conf.

At this point House Agent successfully launched, and I could get to the main web interface. Then I went to the git repo for the JeeLabs plugin and grabbed all of the files there. There wasn't any documentation so I made a directory called JeeLabs in the plugins folder in the House Agent install directory and copied all the files from the git repo there. I then restarted the HouseAgent daemon and was able to successfully add a JeeLabs device.

I stopped at this point since I'll need to actually tie in some JeeNode hardware to continue my investigation. There is a .conf file in the JeeLabs plugin directory that can be used to set the COM port to use and various other things.

There is also a fork of the JeeLabs which appears to be a little more up-to-date here. Even with those changes, when compared to another more up-to-date plugin, like ZWave, it looks like the JeeLabs plugin has been somewhat abandoned.

The web UI is also pretty plain and if I decide to use HouseAgent I'd like to modify it to look a little more snazzy. Right now it looks like an "admin" interface, rather than one that a user would really appreciate. There does seem to be a branch where someone is working on mobile interface here.At this point I kind of gave up since it seemed like getting HouseAgent to run was just fixing one bug after another. HouseAgent seems like a great architecture but would probably take too much time and effort to make usable.Pros:

Written in python (yeah!)

Good plugin architecture

Web-based UI

Cons:

It doesn't look like HouseAgent has been under active developement in several years. Has the project been abandoned?